


The Bones of the Matter We Live In

by anythingbutgrey



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Personal Canon, don't fight me, i fixed everything and you're welcome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 12:29:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11989800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anythingbutgrey/pseuds/anythingbutgrey
Summary: Hell is strangely like the world above, only without vacation days, weekends, or particularly effective air conditioners.  But evil never stops, not even after death, which makes those old mantras of sleeping when dead taste a little sour. | Twenty facts you didn't know aboutAngelseasons four and five.





	The Bones of the Matter We Live In

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2010, archived here. Title is from Thao with the Get Down Stay Down's "Yes, So On and So On"

**1.**

Angel is under the ocean for three months, and, for the first of those, Cordelia spends every moment trying to get someone to help him. No one listens to her, which she finds impossible, since Angel is the world’s _champion_ and all. Still, no one listens, and she can’t get out – though she has tried – so instead she closes her eyes and presses out, reaches down to where she cannot change, but where she can _create_. She can place things, move tiny objects, maneuver spells. She makes Wesley’s milk spoil so he has to go out, so he sees Justine, so he realizes how to find Angel. She makes lamps twist to highlight particular sections of maps so Gunn and Fred know where to look. It doesn’t work particularly well, but she tries, because she has to, because this place is awful, because the man she loves is at the bottom of the sea and his skin is splitting and sometimes she thinks she can feel the cracks in him.

So, she sends him the visions. He thinks them hallucinations, and they are, but they’re hers; they’re her trying to keep him warm. He does a fair bit of hallucinating too, and her attempts to reach out end quite poorly as she loses hold, but she thinks he deserves the respite, deserves the meeting at the beach they never had. She likes that version better.

**2.**

Lilah and Wesley make the relationship bet two months into what neither of them calls a relationship. It’s a Thursday, she remembers, and she makes a comment about Wolfram and Hart’s Halloween parties. “I would love to see Linwood’s face if you walked in with me on your arm,” he smirks, and, though her face is turned away and he cannot see, her mouth parts a little. It is the first projection of a future date that either of them has ever made, and her stomach tries to wring itself out in response. She can already tell, has been noticing for weeks, that this is going deeper than she meant for it to. So, Lilah makes the offer, coating it with a half-drunk laugh like she’s just playing a game. She makes the bet a dollar, inconsequential, because she knows that when one of them says it, it will change them.

**3.**

In the seconds where Charles is dead ( _deaddeadeadstoprepeatingitfreditwontmakeitmakesense_ ), Fred feels herself sinking. It’s another portal, she thinks, the ground collapsing beneath her, tugging her in, and she’ll come out the other side covered in dust and old words she can’t speak. It’s like spinning, it’s the absence of air and breath or perhaps the world is inverted and that is why the blood is rushing to her head and away from the rest of her until her bones fall to pieces it’s the noise that gets to you while falling and the silence that kills you when you get to the other side maybe death is like that maybe that’s what Charles is thinking right now that it’s a portal that she’ll be able to jump through and save him but she can’t because she’s still here and trying to think what that will mean now with all this quiet and she is trying to remember a world where he wasn’t there she’s trying to remember that what it means having never had a Charles before what it was like to never have a Charles before and she can’t remember she can’t remember she can’t –

And then he wakes up.

**4.**

Cordelia is sent back and spends the next six months tied down in her own body and screaming. For the first two weeks, she screams at everyone – strangers on the street, the woman at the coffee shop who asks where she’s been. For the next month she screams at Lorne, Fred, Gunn, Wesley in the moments he’s around. Eventually she gives up, whimpers in the quiet in a decidedly un-Cordelia-like fashion, because she is just so _tired_. She never stops screaming after Angel, though. Surely he can hear her; surely she’s just out of range, like the hiss of a dog whistle. She doesn’t understand how Angel could sense her faint whispers from a higher plane but he can’t hear her cries from the body two feet from him. And she _hates_ him for it, hates him for not seeing it was her, or that she would never do the things she did. He was supposed to know her better than anyone, but he can’t even see the simplest facts, like how the _real_ Cordelia would never walk away from him.

**5.**

Connor doesn’t know if he loves Cordelia. He doesn’t think that emotion runs well in him. It probably makes the blood clot somewhere in his veins, but he knows that what he feels for Cordelia comes close enough. When he kisses her he can remember the time she caught his wrist in her fingers and drained his past out of him, the lightness of it, the quiet that soon somehow turned noisy once again. But if Cordelia can love him – if Cordelia can see something inside of him worth saving, then surely there’s something worth saving inside. He loves her for that.

**6.** In the vision that makes Angelus come crawling to the surface again, Angel is so deep into it he has no idea it’s a dream at all. Of course, this is the point. Of greater importance, as he will realize later, is that he didn’t want to see it, the gaps in logic, Connor’s easy forgiveness, the too-simple destruction of The Beast. Later, he will think about the ways of that dream, the specifics of his perfect day, and will not at all be surprised by the facts of it, the way it curved to make sense even when it didn’t make sense. After all, why _would_ he shy away from a world that brought Cordelia back to him, when his body had craved hers for so long that he had to sometimes struggle to remember a time when it did not, even though it was not so long before? Loving Cordelia might have been new, but everywhere he turned he saw his past as proof of leading him right there, to that moment, to his bedroom and the newly rising sun. It’s not that he thinks of them as destiny; he doesn’t. There are no ancient scrolls for this. Rather, he means just that they entire lives have been a slow pull toward each other, a logical consequence of spinning in the same circles, and this falling, this slope into her, it just happened before he could stop himself. She was the best tool his mind could use to make that perfect day. He remembers the feel of her body pressed against his long after the dream ends.

**6a.**

He whispers Buffy’s name as an apology, because something inside him will always feel indebted to her for the bright afternoon in 1996 when he fell in love with her because she looked like salvation contained in a body not yet fully grown. Falling in love with Cordelia was startling, borderline impossible, but it was so different than what happened with Buffy that it doesn’t surprise him it took him so long to figure out how he and Cordelia fit together. In this difference between the two, tucked away inside of him, he kept his loyalty for Buffy for saving him. Of course Cordelia shaped him and propelled him and created him in ways even Buffy couldn’t, but he wasn’t allowed to say that, let alone think that, not ever. It was against the rules.

But losing his soul with an apparition of Cordelia, not even requiring the real thing to feel that essential spark – well, didn’t that just prove him wrong.

**7.**

That kiss in the office that ends with an elbow in Fred’s face really has nothing to do with Wesley and everything to do with wanting an out. She doesn’t know why she can’t stop seeing blood on her hands, but when she’s away from Charles, it’s easier. Eventually, she has to choose between loving someone and making the nightmares stop. But Fred has been prone to selfishness. She walks away first, and then they never can put it back together again. She never quite understands why, and eventually it all gets so lost in the haze of trying to remember that she forgets.

**7a.**

All the same, the absence of him seems unbearable. It takes a long time for her to be able to sleep well without him in her bed. But Fred’s a survivor. She’s seen worse.

**8.**

Wesley loves Fred because it is easier to love the reflection of what he once was than to look Lilah in the eye and tell the truth. And it’s really that simple.

**9.**

Those false memories they have nestled into their heads really shouldn’t include much of Lilah. Without Connor, Wesley’s memory should just skip over her like a tiny CD scratch only noticed on rare occasion and then forgotten. But Lilah helped build those memories, and that means she made damn sure that Wesley remembers them. If she were kinder, maybe she would have removed that burden from him, but she’d rather be freezing with Judas than let him forget her. Maybe that’s selfish. Maybe that’s Lilah. Maybe it’s just that she’s more human than she thought she was, and cannot bear to see herself erased.

**10.**

When they take the Wolfram and Hart jobs, when Gunn is so insistent on it, maybe – and he’ll never admit this to himself, let alone say it out loud – maybe it’s that he thinks he had been more brain and less brawn he would have been able to keep her.

**10a.**

That this is what kills Fred in the end is never lost on him. When her body is consumed from the inside and all he hears in his head is _yourfaultyourfault_ , he wishes Wesley had killed him. Of course Gunn never stopped loving her, but he let her walk away because it’s what she wanted, and tried not to spend too much time hoping she would one day wander back. So, he means every offer of his life for hers that he makes, and keeps wishing for it day after day. Gunn knows, though, that if there is justice in the world he will stay alive and suffer. Everyone else is so caught up in Wesley’s grief that no one even notices that Gunn and Illyria are hardly ever in the same room, or that Gunn flinches whenever anyone calls it by name.

But this comes later.

**11.**

For Angel, the year begins and ends with the absence of Cordelia, and that makes him feel emptied out, like a damp, echoing cave. It doesn’t matter that for months it wasn’t really her; he still expects to turn around and have her hovering just two feet away. He stares at every brunette on the street as though, like Darla, she could just wander back into his life as proof of impossibility. He keeps on ticking through his days like a time bomb because he’s used to loss, and nothing will ever be worse than losing Connor, but he still dreams of the night she swore she’d be with him until the end.

**12.**

He drives to Sunnydale and kisses Buffy and is jealous of Spike and it’s all _real_ – but the taste of Buffy is familiar and grounding; it’s the sort of thing that he can call back to in an insane world. It’s comfortable and kind and things he never was, but it’s not the same anymore. He has seen too much and done too much and loved too much and lost too much to sit in a room with her and ever discuss their days. He cannot speak of Cordelia. Saying the name feels quite similar to the time Buffy stabbed him with a sword and sent him to hell – but at least Buffy did it with a kiss. And Buffy would laugh at the notion of Cordelia as anything other than the girl she used to be. Buffy wouldn’t understand why Angel keeps turning around to talk to her when there’s no one nearby, or why he spends so much time staring out of windows these days when it has been a long time since he would spend hours brooding. Connor would make Buffy squirm in her seat; Darla would seem a betrayal. However, those things Buffy could get used to. She could learn.

But Buffy could never understand Cordelia, let alone Angel’s relationship with her. She wouldn’t even try, and there would be one off-hand joke about Cordelia’s shallow mind and useless presence and that’d be it. Angel wouldn’t be able to look at Buffy again. So, Angel talks about waiting because he knows with Buffy he will always be waiting, but he has the ghost of his son and his love wrapped around him and he is more than disappointed – but somehow not at all surprised – that Buffy can’t make all of the pain go away the way she used to. To be honest, he’s happy to drive away.

**12a.**

On the drive home, he thinks about kissing her. It’s a familiar sensation, Buffy, her lips, but no tongue. It was chaste, in its own way. All the same, he thinks he should have said no. He should have stepped back. But Angel has never been particularly good at saying no to Buffy. She would disagree with that point – after all, he walked away – but he kept his grasp on her for so long that it didn’t really matter that he left. He still loved her for long enough to essentially still be dedicated to her, like a promise whispered in the dark and just out of hearing range. Does he still love her – that’s a question Angel doesn’t ask. Buffy is safe. She makes him feel safe. When his world is tearing apart, it is nice to have a bit of home. But he can still remember the feel of Cordelia in the now-wispy vision that woke Angelus up, and it makes Buffy taste bitter on his tongue.

He should have said no.

**13.**

Lilah taps an always-manicured fingernail against one of the files on her desk. Hell is strangely like the world above, only without vacation days, weekends, or particularly effective air conditioners. But evil never stops, not even after death, which makes those old mantras of sleeping when dead taste a little sour.

She gestures toward the line of filing boxes that run down the table, and pushes the one in her hands forward.

“This is chapter one,” she says. “Every psych profile, every background check. Every history lesson you need to understand Angel and his team are in these files. When you finish these, you get chapter two.”

Lilah pauses. She _really_ would prefer to have this job herself, but she has her selfish reasons, and the Senior Partners know that. She’s never going above ground again.

Across the table, Eve smirks. “Should be fun.”

**14.**

Spike jars awake and back into half-life with a roar. While the creeping edges of hell rise like weeds around his ankles, he can do nothing but daydream about becoming real again, booking a flight and finding Buffy, the look in her eye as she would see him calling out to her from the shadows. He wants to know if what it would be: the glimmer of surprised joy, or the discomfort that accompanies the return of an old friend.

**14a.**

Fred’s the only one of them who looks at him like a person. It’s a reprieve from the stares and glares that surround him. It’s the way he’d feel when Buffy would look at him sometimes, like he was a _man_. Some days he thinks, if there were no Buffy –

But there will always be Buffy.

**15.**

The day Cordelia lives again she wants to scream. It’s not just that the world she wakes up in is one she can’t make sense of, though she does have a couple daydreams about burning Wolfram and Hart to the ground. It’s that the fuzzy memories of the year before keep popping out at her whenever she turns a corner or sees a half-remembered face. A part of her is glad Connor’s not around; she couldn’t have looked at him and remembered the feel of her body against his and how tired she felt from all that screaming even though she never made a sound he could hear. She had to keep her eyes closed. That trapped Cordelia never slept. She just screamed. And it’s not just that, it’s not just the memories, it’s the present tense. It’s this place that feels drenched in all the things she hates and fears; it’s the way she can see Wolfram and Hart seeping into her friends. It’s the way she’s a foot away from Angel but can’t bring herself to touch him. It’s the way she knows she has to walk away.

**16.**

The truth is, Angel gives up the mission long before Cordelia pulls herself out of that coma to save him the way she has always saved him. Once, a lifetime ago, he told her that he had grown to expect loss, teetering like a glass at the end of his desk and ready to fall to the ground with a crash, but the truth is, despite all that, he never really expected to lose her. Maybe that was a bargain he made with the universe a long time ago, back when he made the mistake of thinking something was listening. Maybe he grows so used to her that he never even considers the possibility of her absence. He knows champions die in battle and Cordelia was the best of them, but all the same, the absence of her is a mold that creeps over him, infecting his lungs and seeping into his stuttering blood stream. He doesn’t lose the mission because he joins Wolfram and Hart. That process is slow, and steady, and begins the day she slips into her last sleep, a place from which he cannot save her. The day after she dies, his shaking hands rest on the telephone, not knowing who to call. He starts to hate the people who knew her in Sunnydale then, the people who thought she could never change and never took a moment to ask. Buffy’s number rests poised on his desk. He doesn’t call.

**17.**

When Wesley finds the paperwork for the memory wipe, he knows too quickly and with absolute certainty what it all means. He’s just surprised he didn’t see it before, because his memories don’t flow together _quite_ right. He feels it like the frustration of a puzzle piece that just won’t fit, no matter how hard one tries to jam the parts together. There are gaps in speed and logic at key turns, like exactly how Lilah ended up in his bed or why her kisses never tasted like dirt, but rather of licorice. There’s a distance between him and the facts, as though someone has thrown a pale curtain between him and what was. He can spend hours trying to stare through, but he keeps missing the details, the tiny things. The whys. When they get their memories back, there is a split second where he expects a relief, and hopes it will explain how he could have loved her, when the simple fact is that he loved her just because he couldn’t stop.

**17a.**

Illyria comes to him and wants to know which memories to watch. She had asked him earlier that day if the memory changes would change his view of Fred. His gut instinct was _No, of course not, never_ , but now he clings to the scaffolding of falsehoods that surround them all because wasn’t that the easy option, the place where he has simply always loved Fred and Lilah was an error. He doesn’t like waking up to find it the other way around, or that trying to bring back one ghost returned a different one instead. He tells Illyria to choose the memories that were implanted in them because that’s the way to _endure_. It’s true. He does not know how to endure this mismatching, because there was before, knowing he was with Lilah but not the sharp colors of it, and there is now, where he has to keep his eyes shut because now he can’t stop seeing the whens, the hows, the whys.

**18.**

Illyria does not ask why this body wants to cross dimensions to save the man who brought Illyria forth, but it does, so the God King crosses over and pulls back a man staggering on the edge. There is a moment of scattered relief in his eye when Illyria saves him. He calls it _Fred_ , that name that is starting to make Illyria feel sick, the name it finds all-confining and infuriating and too small and in-place. This body remembers this man, this Charles Gunn. There is something inside, long forgotten and rusted shut, which misses him. Illyria blinks, and pushes it away.

**19.**

After Cordelia dies, Angel keeps fighting. It’s what she would have wanted, what she _died_ for. But this isn’t like what happened with Buffy. This isn’t like the comparatively simple task of continuing to live in the world he had already built for himself. Their lives were separate enough by that point; Buffy’s death was always going to burn but he had a separate world from her that he could inhabit. With Cordelia, it’s – It’s re-learning motor functions. This is re-learning the basic movements of his body when he can’t turn around and say something to her. Buffy was a presence that snapped him from sleep, but Cordelia kept him awake and without her he has to teach himself about the world again, this time bitter and anew. In the end, he moves the war to its early day because the mission has stopped being a pathway; it has instead become a mudslide. He just doesn’t know how to regulate himself without her, and so he explodes.

**20.**

The after is this: Cordelia saves them. After all, she did say she’d be seeing him. There’s a bright flash of white and a suddenly empty alley and Angel just freezes, standing not five feet from her. She takes a step forward, and he winces. She takes another step, then another. He flinches with every motion until she is right in front of him, and then he shakes his head and says, “This is impossible.”

She smiles, and raises a hand to rest on his cheek. “We’re impossible people,” she says.


End file.
